Schalcken the Painter

The Irish writer of horror fiction, J. T. Sheridan LeFanu (1814-1873), was much admired by M. R. James, author of "A Warning To the Curious," as well as several other Ghost Stories for Christmas made popular by Michael Hordern and the BBC. "I do not claim for this author any very exalted place," James admitted in a lecture on LeFanu, "but I desire to advance the claim that he has attained supremacy in one particular line: he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer." James wasn't necessarily a trustworthy authority on the subject, having already discounted the quality of the writings of Poe, which he attributed to the remoteness of their settings. Horror fiction attracted many great writers, probably because of its popularity as a genre.

Reading LeFanu lately, however, makes one wonder if anyone would be attracted to the following specimen of writing:

"To his dying day Schalken was satisfied of the reality of the vision which he had witnessed, and he has left behind him a curious evidence of the impression which it wrought upon his fancy, in a painting executed shortly after the event we have narrated, and which is valuable as exhibiting not only the peculiarities which have made Schalken’s pictures sought after, but even more so as presenting a portrait, as close and faithful as one taken from memory can be, of his early love, Rose Velderkaust, whose mysterious fate must ever remain matter of speculation.

The picture represents a chamber of antique masonry, such as might be found in most old cathedrals, and is lighted faintly by a lamp carried in the hand of a female figure, such as we have above attempted to describe; and in the background, and to the left of him who examines the painting, there stands the form of a man apparently aroused from sleep, and by his attitude, his hand being laid upon his sword, exhibiting considerable alarm: this last figure is illuminated only by the expiring glare of a wood or charcoal fire."

This excerpt is from the story, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter," which was one of his first short stories collected much later in The Purcell Papers, accounts by a fictitious 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. There was an actual painter from the 17th century named Gottfried Schalcken, who specialized in portraits and intimate scenes that are lit entirely by a single candle. LeFanu seems to have been acquainted with his specialty, and was familiar with certain details of his life. The story, however, is pure invention. The painting that LeFanu describes in detail doesn't exist.

LeFanu's limitations as a writer pose no problem for anyone attempting to adapt one of his stories to film. In 1979, Leslie Megahey adapted LeFanu's story for Schalcken the Painter (with the corrected spelling of the painter's name) for the BBC's Omnibus series. It approaches the story as if it were a docu-drama from the life of Schalcken. He was apprenticed to the painter Gerrit Douw, who was himself an apprentice of Rembrandt. Rembrandt even appears in the film (an actor made up to resemble the self-portrait from 1663, with Rembrandt wearing a painter's hat) as a sort of historical detail adding authenticity to the otherwise fictional account the film dramatizes. In love with Douw's young niece, Rose, but penniless, Schalcken is witness to a transaction between Douw and a wealthy old man from Rotterdam in which a small casket of fine gold is exchanged for his niece in marriage. But this is no ordinary old man. The scene of his face to face meeting with Rose is filmed exactly as LeFanu's relates it:

"Nine o’clock at length came, and with it a summons at the street-door, which, being speedily answered, was followed by a slow and emphatic tread upon the staircase; the steps moved heavily across the lobby, the door of the room in which the party which we have described were assembled slowly opened, and there entered a figure which startled, almost appalled, the phlegmatic Dutchmen, and nearly made Rose scream with affright; it was the form, and arrayed in the garb, of Mynher Vanderhausen; the air, the gait, the height was the same, but the features had never been seen by any of the party before.

The stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face completely. He wore a dark-coloured cloth cloak, which was short and full, not falling quite to the knees; his legs were cased in dark purple silk stockings, and his shoes were adorned with roses of the same colour. The opening of the cloak in front showed the under-suit to consist of some very dark, perhaps sable material, and his hands were enclosed in a pair of heavy leather gloves which ran up considerably above the wrist, in the manner of a gauntlet. In one hand he carried his walking-stick and his hat, which he had removed, and the other hung heavily by his side. A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and its folds rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck.

So far all was well; but the face! — all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue which is sometimes produced by the operation of metallic medicines administered in excessive quantities; the eyes were enormous, and the white appeared both above and below the iris, which gave to them an expression of insanity, which was heightened by their glassy fixedness; the nose was well enough, but the mouth was writhed considerably to one side, where it opened in order to give egress to two long, discoloured fangs, which projected from the upper jaw, far below the lower lip; the hue of the lips themselves bore the usual relation to that of the face, and was consequently nearly black. The character of the face was malignant, even satanic, to the last degree; and, indeed, such a combination of horror could hardly be accounted for, except by supposing the corpse of some atrocious malefactor, which had long hung blackening upon the gibbet, to have at length become the habitation of a demon — the frightful sport of Satanic possession.

It was remarkable that the worshipful stranger suffered as little as possible of his flesh to appear, and that during his visit he did not once remove his gloves.

Having stood for some moments at the door, Gerard Douw at length found breath and collectedness to bid him welcome, and, with a mute inclination of the head, the stranger stepped forward into the room.

There was something indescribably odd, even horrible, about all his motions, something undefinable, that was unnatural, un-human — it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery.

The stranger said hardly anything during his visit, which did not exceed half an hour; and the host himself could scarcely muster courage enough to utter the few necessary salutations and courtesies: and, indeed, such was the nervous terror which the presence of Vanderhausen inspired, that very little would have made all his entertainers fly bellowing from the room. They had not so far lost all self-possession, however, as to fail to observe two strange peculiarities of their visitor.

During his stay he did not once suffer his eyelids to close, nor even to move in the slightest degree; and further, there was a death-like stillness in his whole person, owing to the total absence of the heaving motion of the chest, caused by the process of respiration.

These two peculiarities, though when told they may appear trifling, produced a very striking and unpleasant effect when seen and observed. Vanderhausen at length relieved the painter of Leyden of his inauspicious presence; and with no small gratification the little party heard the street-door close after him.

‘Dear uncle,’ said Rose, ‘what a frightful man! I would not see him again for the wealth of the States!’

‘Tush, foolish girl!’ said Douw, whose sensations were anything but comfortable. ‘A man may be as ugly as the devil, and yet if his heart and actions are good, he is worth all the pretty-faced, perfumed puppies that walk the Mall. Rose, my girl, it is very true he has not thy pretty face, but I know him to be wealthy and liberal; and were he ten times more ugly ——’

‘Which is inconceivable,’ observed Rose.

‘These two virtues would be sufficient,’ continued her uncle, ‘to counterbalance all his deformity; and if not of power sufficient actually to alter the shape of the features, at least of efficacy enough to prevent one thinking them amiss.’

‘Do you know, uncle,’ said Rose, ‘when I saw him standing at the door, I could not get it out of my head that I saw the old, painted, wooden figure that used to frighten me so much in the church of St. Laurence of Rotterdam.’

Gerard laughed, though he could not help inwardly acknowledging the justness of the comparison. He was resolved, however, as far as he could, to check his niece’s inclination to ridicule the ugliness of her intended bridegroom, although he was not a little pleased to observe that she appeared totally exempt from that mysterious dread of the stranger which, he could not disguise it from himself, considerably affected him, as also his pupil Godfrey Schalken."

In one respect, the LeFanu story has a relevance for contemporary readers that wasn't lost on Megahey:

"Marriages were then and there matters of traffic and calculation; and it would have appeared as absurd in the eyes of the guardian to make a mutual attachment an essential element in a contract of marriage, as it would have been to draw up his bonds and receipts in the language of chivalrous romance."

Marriages in the 17th century were financial transactions among men, in which women had little or no say. The arranged marriages that we hear about in some Asian and African countries today are widely deplored, but such practices were common in Europe well into the 20th century.

Despite Rose's misgivings and protests, Douw bundles her off to her wedding in Rotterdam and she is literally carried away in an ornate litter with her husband. Days, weeks pass without word from Rose. Then, without warning, she returns to her uncle's house in obvious terror, dissheveled and distraught, begging him and Schalcken to save her. Believing her to be hysterical, they put her to bed and send for a minister. But she keeps babbling incoherently, the words "The dead and the living cannot be one — God has forbidden it!" and "Rest to the wakeful — sleep to the sleep-walkers." She calls for more candles, the room is too dark, and claims that "he" is already there. But Douw and Schalcken see no one. Finally the minister arrives, but a gust of air blows out the candle and Douw, who had been holding her hand, lets go of it and steps through the chamber door. Instantly the doors of the chamber slam shut, with Rose alone within. They hear screams of terror coming from behind the closed door, then one final shriek. Douw and Schalcken finally wrest open the door, but Rose has vanished. They look out of the window to the canal below, but there is nothing to see except "the waters of the broad canal beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circular ripples, as if a moment before disturbed by the immersion of some large and heavy mass."

I won't give away the ending (closely following LeFanu's tale) but the film elaborates on Schalcken's career after Rose's disappearance, on his obsession with painting models resembling Rose, and on his work on the (fictitious) painting that inspired the tale. It would be an understatement to point out how much care was taken to capture the look of the paintings of the time, especially paintings by Vermeer. We watch as Gerrit Douw oversees his students at life drawing and a still life, but what we see of Douw's house, with its parquet floors and latticed windows, is directly reminiscent of the interiors in Vermeer's painting. On a much more intimate scale, Schalcken the Painter repeats what Stanley Kubrick achieved with Barry Lyndon - recreating the past by painstakingly copying period artworks. The end credits of Schalcken thank several European art galleries for their contributions to the production, not just by supplying the originals of paintings by Gottfried Schalcken, but by providing the director, designer, and cinematographer with inspiration for their work on the film. Christine Rawlins designed the sumptuous costumes, Anna Ridley was the production designer, and John Hooper is credited as the "lighting cameraman" - presumably in charge of the cinematography and lighting. Leslie Megahey, the film's director, deserves the highest praise. As I have already pointed out, he reportedly accepted the post as editor of the BBC documentary series Omnibus on condition that he make Schalcken the Painter. Omnibus is a documentary program, but Megahey shot his film as if it were a docudrama about events in the lives of historical personages, making LeFanu's tale seem authentic. The excellent cast includes Jeremy Clyde as Schalcken, Cheryl Kennedy as Rose, Maurice Denham as Dou, and John Justin, who was the handsome hero in the 1940 (!) The Thief of Baghdad, plays the dreadful Mynher Vanderhausen. 

The Fearless Vampire Killers

Before proving himself a master of the horror film genre with Rosemary's Baby in 1968, Roman Polański made the horror spoof Dance of the Vampires (1966), based on his own (and Gerard Brach's) original story. I have loved it ever since I first saw it on TV, probably a few years after its theatrical release in the States. Unfortunately, the film that I saw was called The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, Martin Ransohoff's clumsily edited (and foolishly retitled) American release version, with 12 minutes cut from the original and a "goofy" voice dubbed over Jack MacGowran's to try and amplify the "wacky" elements of Polański's film. Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert devoted the entirety of his (short) review of the edited film to pointing out the conspicious absence of laughter coming from the movie theater audience. "The night I went to see The Fearless Vampire Killers," wrote Ebert,  "nobody laughed. One or two people cried, and a lady behind me dropped a bag of M&Ms which rolled under the seats, and a guy on the center aisle sneezed at 43 minutes past the hour. But that was about all the action." (January 22, 1968) From his enviable perch at The New York Times, Bosley Crowther acknowledged Polański's desire that his name be removed from the version of his film screened in Manhattan,(1) but, based on what he saw, "there is no sign that Mr. Polański was pointing towards some sly satiric jest, some arrangement of weird allegory so that his society of vampires would have significance apt for today. He was evidently only trying to make fun of horror films, forgetting that horror films, played straight, are now more often funny—unconsciously to—than horrible." (November 14, 1967)

MGM tried to market the U.S. release version as a "farce," but the film that Polański and Brach conceived at an Alpine ski resort during the cutting of Cul-de-Sac was a kind of gothic fairy tale, a "satirical horror drama" with strong Eastern European overtones (Transylvania is in Romania), streaked with Yiddish comedy (the innkeeper, Yoine Shagal, and his wife Rebecca). It parodies every vampire movie cliché (the garlic, the crosses, the sleeping in coffins, the wooden stake through the heart, reflections in mirrors), and toys with the erotic element by introducing a gay vampire (Count von Kroloch's son, Herbert).

Shooting commenced inauspiciously in Austria when all the snow suddenly melted and the production had to relocate to the Italian Alps (the Seiser Alm in the Dolomites). It was Polanski's first film both in color (Metrocolor) and widescreen (Panavision), and he got considerable help realizing his vision from cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, production designer Wilfred (spelled "Wilfrid" in the clever opening credits designed by André François) Shingleton, and a certain "Christopher" Komeda, better known by his Polish name Krzysztof. Komeda composed scores for other Polanski films, including Rosemary's Baby. For Dance of the Vampires, he composed an especially pretty waltz for the grand ball of risen vampires in Von Krolok's castle.(2)

Old Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) and his young assistant Alfred (Polański) have arrived "deep in the heart of Transylvania" hoping to confirm the existence of vampires. Arriving at an inn run by Yoine Shagal and his wife Rebecca, the professor has to be thawed out from the long sleigh ride through the frozen countryside, and the first thing he notices upon coming to is garlic hanging overhead. He points this out to Alfred and inquires of Shagal if there is a castle nearby. Shagal and the villagers present, but for the village idiot, are suspiciously mum. What's funny about these early scenes is that Abronsius is clearly a fool, but his preposterous theories about vampires are proven to be totally right. The Shagals have a young daughter, the lovely Sara (Sharon Tate, given a pile of red hair to appease a producer who wanted Jill St. John in the role), who has a fetish for bathing "at least once a day." Arthur at first thinks she's referring to sex at least once a day, which wins his somewhat abashed approval. Spying on her through a keyhole, he witnesses the vampire, Count Von Krolok (Ferdy Mayne) attacking her in the bath, setting off the film's main plot - rescuing Sara from almost certain undeath.

Ill advisedly, Yoine takes a big bite out of a garlic knob and goes out into the night to save Sara. He is found next morning frozen to a tree stump. Upon examination by Abronsius, however, he finds that Yoine's death did not come from exposure to the freezing elements. He finds bite marks on Yoine's neck, his wrist, and his belly. When Abronsius tells Rebecca that he must now drive a wooden stake through Yoine's heart, she attacks him with the stake and drives them upstairs. By the time they have a chance to do the deed, Yoine the vampire awakes. He's his same joking self (Alfie Bass is inspired as Yoine) until he sees how intent Abronsius and Alfred are to destroy him. Pursued through the inn (Polański indulges in frequent transitions to silent-film speed in his slapstick scenes), Yoine finds himself in the maid's room. She (the toothsome Fiona Lewis) brandishes a crucifix at Yoine, who laughs and tells her, "Have you got the wrong vampire!" Yoine's appearances throughout the rest of the film provide comic relief. Who knew that a vampire could be funny?

Sneaking inside Von Krolok's castle is treacherous for Abronsius and Alfred. They are caught (Krolok turns out to be a fan of Abronsius's research into vampirism), are made comfortable in the castle, and are even invited to the grand ball to be held the following night. During the day Abronsius and Alfred must find the Count's resting place before the sun sets. After finding the way through a window into the Count's crypt, Alfred slips through, but the professor gets himself stuck halfway. So Alfred has to go back outside to pull the professor out. On his way, however, he finds Sara, as usual having a bath, after following the sound of her plaintive singing. With a bite mark on her neck, that she demurely tries to cover, Alfred finds her even more alluring than before. He remembers the Professor, now half-frozen hanging half-in, half-out of the window, and goes back out to extricate him. But their bag of wooden stakes and crucifixes tumbles off the parapet to the ground far below.

Looking for Sara again, this time Alfted encounters Herbert, the Count's son, in the bathroom wearing nothing but his nightshirt and aggressively interested in Alfred. He forces his attentions on the timid Alfred, who has a little book of love poetry. The little book saves him when Herbert tries to bite him and, thanks to Alfred's swift maneuvering, he sinks his teeth into the book instead.(3) A chase ensues, revealing Polański's knowledge of a scene from a Buster Keaton classic (the castle galleries resemble the decks of the derelict ship in Keaton's The Navigator).

I wondered why there would be mirrors in the castle, and such large ones, other than as convenient devices to reveal - or not reveal - to Alfred that the vampires cast no reflection in them and that Sara, though bitten, is still a mortal. At an appointed hour, the castle cemetery empties of a multitude of decrepit vampires, all dressed for a ball from centuries before, and a macabre dance ensues, accompanied by the aformentioned waltz played on a harpsichord.(4) Abronsius and Alfred skilfully manage to escape confinement, steal some clothes from a pair of particularly ancient vampires and join in the dance, intending to steal Sara from the Count's clutches. How they manage to pull off Sara's rescue and escape the castle I will leave you, dear reader, to discover for yourself. Polański proved himself to be a resourceful director in the film's climax, even sneaking in a twist ending that should come as no real surprise to aficionados of the horror genre.

This was to be Polański's last film made in Europe before his sojourn in Hollywood. He took a few Polish friends along with him to California, including Krzysztof Komeda and Wojciech Frykowski. Frykowski was present on the night - August 8, 1969 - the Manson family visited Polański's residence, brutally murdering Frykowski, Sharon Tate and two others (in addition to Tate's unborn child). It was a sobering reminder that Polański's preoccupation with death and violence in his films (his 1971 production of Macbeth is exceedingly bloody) had deeply personal origins.


(1) Polański stated, “I’ve called them and asked them to have my name removed because I don’t want credit for a film I didn’t really make. The one now showing is far from the one I filmed.”
(2) In December 1968, at a party in Los Angeles, Komeda was pushed off an ledge by the Polish writer Marek Hłasko and suffered a serious head injury which left him in a coma. Komeda died in Poland four months later. Hłasko said, ""If Krzysztof dies, I'll go along." Hłasko died in Wiesbaden shortly after Komeda's death, possibly by his own hand.
(3) Incidentally, the Polish actor Vladek Sheybal supplied the voice of Herbert, a clever trick Polański learned when he had to re-record all the dialogue for Knife in the Water. Since the actor who played the hitchhiker was unavailable, Polański dubbed his lines himself.
(4) The ditty is conspicuously absent from the soundtrack album.

Scare Me

The problem I have with scary movies is that, with notable exceptions, they no longer scare me. I was plenty scared by them when I was a child, but it was because I hadn't yet figured out that the people who made them were simply using tricks of the motion picture medium to manipulate me as a member of the audience. Now that I am more knowledgeable about how movies are put together and how many quite simple technical devices are employed to create an emotional or sometimes visceral reaction, I can no longer suspend my disbelief long enough to get a good scare out of them. Like an old movie ghost, I find that I can see through the special effects to the trickery behind them.(1)

Of course, it's also because I have grown into a skeptical adult, and because horror, the distinct genre of stories and plays and films that have developed (if that is the word) since the 19th century, plays upon conventions - widely accepted formal requirements - that are far from the ordinary lives of human beings. I remain skeptical of the reality, of the existence, of much of its subject matter. Many famous people, some of them reputable, claim to have seen ghosts. Even George Orwell, who was probably the person least susceptible to such an experience who ever lived, described in a letter an encounter with a ghost in Walberswick cemetery: “I happened to glance over my shoulder, & saw a figure pass ... disappearing behind the masonry & presumably disappearing into the churchyard. I wasn’t looking directly at it & so couldn’t make out more than that it was a man’s figure, small & stooping, & dressed in lightish brown; I should have said a workman. I had the impression that it glanced towards me in passing, but I made out nothing of the features. At the moment of its passing I thought nothing, but a few seconds later it struck me that the figure had made no noise, & I followed it out into the churchyard. There was no one in the churchyard, & no one within possible distance along the road – this was about 20 seconds after I had seen it; & in any case there were only two people in the road, & neither at all resembled the figure.... The figure had therefore vanished. Presumably an hallucination." (Letter dated 16 August 1931 to Dennis Collings)

What else could it have been? However intrigued he was by the encounter, Orwell never wrote a ghost story. In fact, none of the great novelists or dramatists wrote what are narrowly identifiable as ghost stories. There are ghosts in Shakespeare's plays - the ghost in Hamlet even speaks. But none of his plays is about ghosts. Dickens wrote stories featuring ghosts, and even contributed the most famous ghost story for Christmas (a strange and delightful British tradition), A Christmas Carol, that contains no less than four ghosts who pay visits to Ebeneezer Scrooge one fateful Christmas Eve. But it's a Christmas story, not a ghost story.

Dickens was an admirer of Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings, however exceptional they are, are distinguished by a level of conviction that has given them, like Poe himself, a unique place in literature. None of the so-called "gothic" writers who preceded and succeeded him were nearly as good as Poe or as convincing.

There is a ghost story related by the near-insane character Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. He claims to have encountered the ghost of his dead wife and of an old servant. Raskolnikov refuses to believe in them, but Svidrigailov leaves him with a disturbing metaphor for eternity: “We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners, and that’s the whole of eternity.” (Crime and Punishment, Part Four, Chapter Two) However convincingly strange Svidrigailov's accounts may be, Dostoevsky wrote no ghost stories.

Ambrose Bierce, who witnessed some of the bloodiest battles - like Shiloh - of the American Civil War, wrote of ghosts in his stories with a reporter's matter-of-factness that lends them an uncanny quality. I wrote about an excellent short film adapted from Bierce's story about a man about to be hanged for espionage from Owl Creek Bridge. Awaiting his execution, the man engages his imagination in a vivid daydream in which the rope that hangs him breaks and he swims to freedom, being chased and fired upon for miles. He reaches safety and finds himself in familiar surroundings. He finds his own house and his wife and, "As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."

And Henry James, who liked reading ghost stories, wrote stories and a novel that could be classified as ghost stories. In fact, The Turn of the Screw is widely celebrated as a gripping, if extra-carefuly written, story of the haunting to two English children by two ghosts. In his close reading of the novel, however, Edmund Wilson concluded that The Turn of the Screw is ambiguous as to what actually happens, whether we can take it as a straight ghost story or as a subtle psychological portrait of an emotionally and sexually repressed English nanny. It is this ambiguity, I think, that makes the novel more fascinating than it would be if the reader weren't left wondering, if only in the back of his mind, exactly what he has read.

I have had encounters, two of them, that occurred when I was in the Far East, that have left me wondering about ghosts. The first encounter was in Okinawa when I was stationed there in the Navy. The Japanese island of Okinawa was the site of some of the most intense battles of World War Two. The base on which I was stationed, called White Beach, is on a peninsula on the eastern coast of the island. There are cliffs above the beaches that are pitted with caves, some of which are closed to the public and marked with signs designating them as tombs. Japanese soldiers withdrew from the fighting into these caves and committed suicide, sometimes using grenades to kill themselves. One night in 1993, I was walking with a few friends up the road that wound down from the front gate. I had to use an ATM first, so I told my friends to go ahead of me and I would catch up with them. As I was climbing the hill, I passed a young Japanese man who approached me and, putting two fingers to his lips, let me know that he wanted a cigarette. I gestured that I had no cigarettes, and the young man shrugged his soldiers and continued on his way down the hill. All I remember specifically about his clothes was the cap on his head, which looked like it was military issue, one that I had seen in old photos of Japanese soldiers. When I caught up with my friends, some of whom had cigarettes in their hands, I asked them why they hadn't offered the man who passed me - and who had to have passed them - a cigarette. "What man?" they asked. They had passed no one on the road. Ever since then, I have thought that it was perhaps the ghost of a soldier who had killed himself in one of the caves in the cliffs above White Beach.. Or else it was "an hallucination."

The second encounter took place in the Philippines, where I'm now living. In 2016, a Filipino man I knew died of a heart attack. His widow paid for a traditional funeral, which was preceded by a long vigil, like a wake, that lasted for days. I went to her house by the highway on the first day to give her my condolences. I sat down, but I did not wish to stay very long, because Filipino parties are segregated, with the men outside drinking and carousing, and the women inside cooking and preparing drinks (as well as drinking and carousing). The man sitting next to me was getting drunk, but I wasn't drinking at the time, so I excused myself and headed back down the highway toward home. As I was walking I kept an eye out for a ride, but there was no ride forthcoming. So, since it was another mercilessly beautiful day, late afternoon, I decided to walk the kilometer or so home. After I passed the crest of a hill, it was downhill the rest of the way, and I was alone on the highway. I rounded two curves down the highway until I saw a man standing ahead of me on my side of the highway. I noticed he was wearing a "barong," a traditional sheer long-sleeve shirt that covers a short-sleeved shirt underneath, with black trousers. But why was he standing there? If he wanted to catch a bus - out of town (which is the only bus to catch), he should've been on the other side of the highway. He was facing to the West, where the afternoon sky was already turning orange. And as I approached where he stood, watching my step along the edge of the highway, I recognized him as the man whose vigil I had just left, who was lying in his coffin in the front room of his house, dressed in the same clothes he was standing up in by the highway. He paid no attention to me as, without thinking, I crossed to the other side, while keeping my eyes on him. He was gazing at the sky to the west with a look of utter distraction and peace on his face. I walked past, keeping him in my peripheral view, and proceeded at a normal pace, turning my head every now and then, making sure he hadn't moved. But when the highway wound to the left, I picked up my pace for the rest of the way. It was the last I ever saw of the man. I didn't join the funeral procession to the cemetery a few days later. This Undas, November 2nd, the Filipino Day of the Dead, his widow will visit the cemetery with food and drink, enough for herself and some for her dead husband, and pay her respects. If she doesn't do it, Filipinos believe that his spirit will grow restless again and it will walk the earth. I won't be walking that particular stretch of highway again unless I am accompanied by another living soul.

But the real problem I have with ghost stoires, and with horror movies, is that the best writers and filmmakers usually avoid the genre, just like every other genre, because it imposes an artificial structure on the story or the film that interferes with their discovery of life, with the illumination of their characters with a light that seems to come as much from within them as around them. Hitchcock resorted to horror effects when he made Psycho, but even some of the critics who admired his work were appalled at the result. In his brief notice of the film, Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "Two murders and a third attempt are among the most vicious I have ever seen in films, with Hitchcock employing his considerable skill in direction and cutting and in the use of sound and music to shock us past horror-entertainment into resentment." Hitchcock drags us into an embezzlement scheme, makes us care about what happens next to Janet Leigh, only to then have us take part in her brutal murder by a knife-wielding mental case. Thanks, Al, but no thanks. Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho only proved how uselessly formulaic the original was.

Effectively entertaining horror films have been made in the past by skilled filmmakers. I think of William Friedkin, fresh from The French Connection - an effective crime thriller - who made The Exorcist (1973), which is probably the scariest film I've seen. Even if one doesn't believe in God or the Devil, the film will make one jump at most of the carefully appointed moments. (Be careful how you're holding your popcorn.) But Friedkin's skill was just about up to the level of horror-entertainment and not higher. When he thought he was good enough to remake Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, with a budget much greater than Clouzot's, the film (Sorcerer, 1977) was a failure on several levels, and it sent Friedkin's career on a circuitous detour.

Now there is CGI to further complicate matters. Now all manner of horrors can be visualized on the screen, including heretofore unimagined ones. Whatever can be conceived, in fact, can now be realized in a motion picture, including holographic three-dimensional images of actors and entertainers long dead. Such technical advances always have little or no effect on the quality of films.(2) If anything, technical advances set the art of the motion picture back a few years because it takes awhile for filmmakers to master them. As I wrote some time ago, CGI has now made film animation both easy and impossible. The best thing that the latest technical advances has done, I think, is to simplify filmmaking to the point at which it is now quite possible for a film to be made from start to finish and also to reach a mass audience with a great deal less money. If independent filmmakers find it easier to make a horror film (remember the success of the first Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity films), it shouldn't come as all that much of a surprise. Especially to horror movie fans.


(1) For similar reasons, I don't like magicians either. There can be only two reasons why people find them entertaining: it's either because they believe they're witnessing real magic or because they like to be fooled.
(2) It was Stanley Kauffmann who, writing film criticism for 55 years (1958-2013), came up with the statistical estimate that, "in a good year," 95% of the films realeased are trash, 4% are good entertainment [remember that number before underestimating good entertainment], and less than 1% are accomplished art. And that's in a good year.

Running to Ruin

This week I was reading a conversation in Forbes with Rupert Everett about Oscar Wilde. Everett has just directed and stars in The Happy Prince, a film that concentrates on Wilde's last three years.

Why did you want to make a film focused on the final, tragic years of Oscar Wilde's life?

Oscar Wilde had an appointment with the gutter from very early on. Self-destruction always seems like something made up for books, because you can't really imagine why we deliberately ruin things for ourselves. But it does happen and he had it very strongly. As he himself said, "why does one run towards ruin?" He was a big star, the most famous man in London, the life and soul of the Café Royal. And it's fascinating to me, how big stars become blind ... I wanted to create the impression that it happens to us all at some point — we do something so wrong that the universe freezes around us and the whole world watches in horror as you make this move you won't ever be able to retrieve yourself from.(1)

I'm not sure specifically what Everett meant that Wilde had done wrong that made the universe recoil in horror. Was it his open homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, his decision to sue Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, that Marquess of Queensberry) for libel when he called Wilde a "sodomite", or was it Wilde's refusal, after his libel case collapsed and he was going to be charged with sodomy (illegal in 1897), to flee to safety in France?

In any case, Wilde was tried and eventually found guilty. The judge sentenced him (with extreme prejudice) to the maximum penalty allowed by law: two years in prison at hard labor. So, the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, who had been the toast of London literary society just weeks before, was escorted first to Newgate Prison and then to Reading Gaol to serve out his sentence. At last permitted books and paper, he wrote a 50,000 word letter to Lord Alfred, which was published in expurgated form in England as De Profundis, and the long poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

On his release, Wilde finally went to live in France (two years too late) under an assumed name. Reading the conclusion of Richard Ellmann's magnificent biography of Wilde, he relates that at the end of November 1900, Wilde was stricken with what was then called meningitis and died. Ellmann speculated that he could possibly have died from tertiary syphilis - a disease he contracted at Oxford from a (female) prostitute. Those present at the moment of his death reported that an extremely noxious smelling black liquid oozed from all of his orafices.


But I go back to the words of Rupert Everett: that Wilde had destroyed himself, that he had been running toward ruin for some time when ruin descended on him. Someone close to me recently told me something in an email that filled me with apoplectic indignation. I get that way whenever someone accuses me of doing something that I didn't do. Something to do with my seeming to make the same great mistake in my life in 2007 that I made in 1995 - by leaving the Navy in 1995 and coming straight to the Philippines (to be married) only to realize within a month that I had made a huge mistake and I needed help getting myself back home to the States. Then, 12 years later, divorced, I did it again - leaving my sister's house in Alaska and coming back to the Philippines, only to (within weeks) realize I had made a huge mistake a second time - though under entirely different circumstances. This person close to me admitted that if they had helped me in 1995 to get myself out of the mess I'd made, they would be reluctant to help me again. So, I'm the boy who cried wolf.

In Proverbs, it says, As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. But I have often said, after the fact of course when it was too obvious to overlook, that I am my own fool and I will make my own folly. My own folly. My sister liked to say that she didn't "suffer fools," as in another Proverb: Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him./Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. This meant that, especially towards the unexpected end of her life, my sister managed to drive some friends and potential friends away from her.

But Blake said that if the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man. And I have persisted. But have I become wise? Yes, but after the event. Giacomo Casanova, writing his memoirs in his old age, concluded that the wisdom that age had brought him had stolen his youth into the bargain. What good was wisdom when it came too late?

I have paid for my latest mistake by being exiled to an island in a foreign country for 10 years of my life. Not at hard labor. But I have grown old, which is immeasurably harder than Reading Gaol's treadmill. "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." So wrote Oscar Wilde, who didn't live long enough to see old age. I haven't had a medical examination since I was 49. I am losing all of my teeth. And an as yet undisclosed portion of the small government pension upon which I have depended all these years is about to be taken away from me.

The Greeks believed in the Furies, a divine force that intervenes at the moment in our lives when we somehow make up our minds that the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to us, transgressing laws that we never suspected were written down somewhere. Are our own lives not our own property, to do with as we see fit? I am learning that they are not.

44 years ago, Philip Larkin had this to say about "A Life With a Hole In It":

When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your own way
A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) . . .

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get.  Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly.  Years.



One of my all-time favorite movie lines occurs in Cutter's Way, in which the late John Heard, who plays a disabled Vietnam vet, looks into his alcoholic wife's eyes and says, "Some day in Tahiti we'll look back on all this and laugh." At this stage, and for quite some time now, I would settle for Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Secaucus, New Jersey - anywhere in the Contiguous United States from which to look back on this and laugh. Some day.


(1) Forbes, "Drinking Absinthe With Rupert Everett (And Talking About Oscar Wilde)" by Adam Morganstern, October 15, 2018.

Von

When I was a boy, I was predisposed to like silent films. I lived in a household where the slightest disturbance could set my mother off into a temper tantrum. A stroke at the age of 40 had left her utterly defenseless against the slightest stress, and trying to make ends meet on a career soldier's salary with four children meant that her tantrums were frequent and unpredictable. This resulted in my being an exceptionally quiet child. I loved libraries because it was a place where quiet was required. And I took to silent films almost instinctively. I even found the term silent film irresistible. I remember watching Chaplin (of course) and the Douglas Fairbanks classic The Thief of Baghdad (1924) I saw every one of Greta Garbo's silent films, especially Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert.

But when I grew up, I learned that silence is as much a part of a musical composition or recording as the notes, that silence is so much more than simply the absence of sound, and that only a sound film could use silence creatively. Besides, every silent film I ever saw had some kind of musical accompaniment. One of my cherished memories was watching Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Des Moines with a live chamber orchestra playing Chaplin's own score.

The question may seem impertinent to some (like Kevin Brownlow), but, regarding filmmakers, exactly how many lasting reputations has the silent film yielded? Once you get past the pioneers, the Lumière brothers and Meliès, there are Griffith, Chaplin, Sjöström, Murnau, Keaton, and Eisenstein. Six. Who else? Dreyer made a few sound films that never equalled his last silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Lang was one of the most successful directors of the silent era, whose career in sound films was interrupted by the Nazis. Metropolis (1927) is remarkably ambitious, but I now find Spione (1928) far more interesting. (He, like Murnau, wound up in Hollywood.) The other Russians - Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov - were in Eisenstein's shadow. The French experimentalists - Delluc, Epstein, Feyder - were, well, experimentalists.

Erich Oswald Stroheim was an Austrian immigrant, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1909. Adopting the Von in his name, convincing people be was an exiled Austrian aristocrat,(1) he started working in films in 1914 with D. W. Griffith, then worked as a technical adviser and became famous during the First World War playing Huns, caricatures intended to inspire anti-German sentiment, in films that carried the tagline, "The Man You Love to Hate." After the war, he impressed producers enough that they allowed him to direct. Blind Husbands (1919) and the far more subtle Foolish Wives (1922), in both of which he acted, set the tone of his style of filmmaking and his penchant for extravagance in pursuit of realism. The total production costs of Foolish Wives reportedly topped $1 million before Irving Thalberg, whom Carl Laemmle had appointed the head of his Universal studio, shut it down before Stroheim had completed it and cut it from four hours to three.

No less important to the development of Stroheim's filmmaking skills was his relationship with Hollywood's most powerful producers - Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Thalberg. The fact that producers were prepared to accept extravagance in its productions at the height of the silent era, especially from directors like Stroheim, who were already famous for their European sophistication, however unsophisticated American perception of it was, certainly contributed to Stroheim's extravagance during his subsequent productions. And the Hollywood trade papers, owned by William Randolph Hearst, that thrived on gossip (only recall how they had destroyed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's career by spreading salacious lies about him during his "rape" trial - one wonders how Arbuckle would fare in the #MeToo era), followed Stroheim's every move.

His work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Irving Thalberg, who fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. Stroheim then managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. He showed Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, to a select group of people his cut of the material, which is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. But then disaster struck. A theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg once again the head of production. Thalberg took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child."

In 1999, a four-hour version of the film was aired on Turner Classic Movies that used Stroheim's shooting script and production still photographs to reconstruct scenes from the truncated film, if only to give viewers a better idea of the film that Stroheim had intended us to see.(2) All that it really accomplished, I think, was to emphasize the enormity of Stroheim's vision and the loss to world film. The fact that what is left of the film looks so unlike every other film Stroheim made is an indication of the originality his vision. Stories of the incredible lengths to which Stroheim went in the name of realism abound. For Greed, he took his cast and crew to Death Valley for the shooting of the film's climax. The conditions, the heat and the below sea level pressure, caused health problems among the crew and even the death of a camera operator. For the early scene of McTeague as a miner, Stroheim took actors and crew down an actual mine, rather than simply recreating the scene on a studio set. He clearly wanted his actors to respond to the adverse conditions in ways that would make their performances more convincing.

Unbelievably, the reputation of Greed, even in its mutilated state, grew greater with the passing years. In 1952, a poll of critics sponsored by the British Film Institute ranked Greed 7th among the "Greatest Films of All Time". A second poll conducted ten years later ranked it 4th. It's comparable to the discovery of a fragment, one quarter, of a lost play by Shakespeare that is so tantalizing that its very incompleteness makes it seem more valuable than Hamlet or King Lear. No one living has seen the film that Stroheim made, so how can anyone make such extravagant claims about its greatness? The same can be said of RKO's edit of Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It, too, was altered from the finished version that Welles intended, simply because the studio head only wanted films short enough to be part of a "double feature" bill that were popular during the war. What RKO trimmed from Ambersons was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it has been ranked impossibly high on the BFI critics polls. What do the critics see that I don't - that I can't - see? 

After the failure of Greed, Stroheim returned to the studio and the familiar world of Viennese high society for The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the latter intended to be Stroheim's tribute to a vanished antebellum Vienna. Joseph Kennedy, who had made a fortune from bootlegging during Prohibition, got into movies by proďucing Queen Kelly (1929), with a young starlet named Gloria Swanson (who was Kennedy's lover). Stroheim was hired to direct. When Kennedy got wind of some of the "indecent" things that Stroheim was putting into Queen Kelly, he shut the production down and fired Stroheim. An alternate ending, directed by Richard Boleslawski, was eventually shot and Swanson released the film in Europe in 1932. It was never shown in America until it was aired on television. With heavy irony, Billy Wilder accepted Stroheim's suggestion that some of the footage from Queen Kelly be used in Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Stroheim played Norma Desmond's (Swanson's) trusted butler, to establish her as a former silent movie star.

Stroheim tried to direct a few more times, but no one would give him free rein again. He returned to acting and, again with impeccable irony, played a hun once more, Rauffenstein, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). In 1939, he was ready to direct a film in France, with all the arrangements made, when the outbreak of World War Two cancelled them and he had to return to America for his safety. He returned to France after the war, where reverence for him as a great artist allowed him to live opulently. Just before his death in 1957, he was awarded the Legion d'honneur. "In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last picture. If you've had nothing in production for the past three months, you're forgotten. In France, if you write one good book, paint one good picture, or make one good movie, fifty years can go by and you're still regarded as an artist. They never forget you."

Based on the films that are more or less intact, Foolish Wives and The Wedding March are perhaps Stroheim's most substantial achievements. All we have of them is what Stroheim chose to place in front of his cameras, and based on that alone, they are impressive. They require patience and concentration - attributes lacking in contemporary filmgoers. I didn't see my first Stroheim film until I was in my 20s. By then, my preference for silent films had waned. I continue to watch the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Chase, and Laurel and Hardy. The last silent film drama I watched in its entirety was Eisenstein's October a year ago. The greatest silent films, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Buñuel's Andalusian Dog and L'Age d'Or, are fascinating. Mindful of the cruelties inflicted on him by his producers, Stroheim's films have an added aura of sadness. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote when the 4-hour Greed was aired in 1999, "the directing career he might have had, the work he might have given us, is only one more sharp poignancy in the 'what if' history of the arts."(3)


(1) Billy Wilder commented that Stroheim spoke German with a noticeably lower-class Austrian accent. In La Grande Illusion, Stroheim spoke his German dialogue with a strong American accent. Everyone who knew Stroheim called him "Von."
(2) This version of Greed has been available on iTunes, but has not yet been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.
(3) The New Republic, December 13, 1999.

Leaf Season

Reading from an actual book on a September Saturday for no other reason than that my electric co-op decided to be uncooperative and deprived every person on my Philippine island of electricity for 12 hours (which turned into 13), I was attracted to the story "Leaf Season" in my hardback copy of John Updike's Collected Later Stories - because the following day was the beginning of Fall, and because that season (like the others) doesn't exist here in the tropics. This inescapable fact has never prevented me from observing, in the quietest of ways, the passing of the missing seasons from one to the next to the next, as the years of my prolonged sojourn here have gone by. So, in a mood of tender nostalgia, I turned to the story, first published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1986.

T. S Eliot, an American poet who so wanted to be an Englishman that he tried to out-English them,(1) wrote: "A people without history/Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails/On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel/History is now and England." ("Little Gidding V"). One of the things that have always attracted me to Updike's stories was his poetic power to lift almost every part of life, every anecdotal detail, from childhood to young manhood to old manhood, into shimmering language. The most salient aspect of art lies in finding beauty in the unlikliest places. Even if it is only the transformation of a sow's ear into a silk purse, you cannot have one without the other - the mundanest object can be made into a thing of beauty and value by an artist. And John Updike had always, or much of the time, expended his talents in immortalizing moments, even the most trivial, with the power of his words.

In the story, "Leaf Season," the narrator (who doesn't identify himself and seems to float around the action he describes like a revenant) tells us of a long weekend excursion from Boston across New Hampshire to Vermont: "Off we go! Saturday morning, into our cars, children and dogs and all, driving north to Vermont in leaf season to the Tremayne's house on the Columbus Day weekend. It's become a custom, one of the things we all do, the four or five families, a process that can't be stopped without running the risk of breaking a spell." Strangely, the storyteller is a member of the group, he observes the characters, the husbands and wives (and children and dogs) but he takes no part in the action.

He gives specific driving directions, the highways and byways all the way to the Tremaynes' house, until they enter Vermont where, "At once, there is a difference: things look cleaner, sparser than in New Hampshire. . . . And the leaves, whole valleys and mountains of them - the the strident pinks and scarlets of the maples, the clangorous gold of the hickories, the accompanying brasses of birch and beech, on both sides of the road, rise aftet rise, a heavenly tumult tied to our dull earth only by broad bands of evergreen and outcroppings of granite."

It's described like something out of The Enchanted Cottage - a quasi-magical realm that has a geographic location but which is slightly other-worldly, where everything takes on a kind of patina that is doesn't have elsewhere. Everyone arrives, and we meet them one by one. The storyteller continues to describe the enchantment of the place where they have gathered. "How old are we? Scarcely into our forties.(2) Lots of life left to live. the air here is delicious, crisper and drier than air around Boston. We start to breathe it now, and to take in where we are. The sounds are fewer, and those few are different - individual noises: a single car passing on the road, a lone crow scolding above the stubbled side field, a single window sash clicking back and forth in the gentle wind we hadn't noticed when outside unpacking the cars. The smells of the house are country smells - linoleum, ashes, split wood, plaster, a primeval cellar damp that rises through the floorboards and follows us up the steep, wear-rounded stairs to the second floor . . ."

The eating, drinking and the party games commence, they play softball until dark, then bridge indoors. Some stay up late and others adjourn upstairs to their segregated bunks. People awake, still hesitant to let the night before fade entirely fom their memories, and Sunday commences. It's what Updike intended to be a tour-de-force. And as so often in Updike, there are things that remind the reader of the single American writer most beloved by Updike, John Cheever.

Updike's life in letters often mirrored Cheever's, one has the feeling, at certain moments, intentionally. Cheever was twenty years older than Updike, started writing, precociously in more than one sense, when he was a boy. He did not, like Updike, distinguish himself in school, leaving (or being expelled) before he is 18. Heeding e e cummings' advice to get out of Boston, Cheever moved to New York City when he was 22. He published the first of what would eventually amount to 121 stories in The New Yorker in 1935, hired an agent, and never looked back.(3)

Updike, with a much more stable home life, became fascinated from the age of 11 with New York City and The New Yorker magazine, to which his mother had subscribed. He rose steadily and brilliantly through the academic ranks, eventually landing at Harvard. The first things he published were poems, but The New Yorker began to accept his first stories in 1955. Updike said of Cheever: "John Cheever was often labelled as a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia. Only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it." Updike wrote about much the same subject, except his suburbanites lived and married and threw cocktail parties outside Boston.

"Leaf Season" is reminiscent of the Cheever stories, "The Common Day" and "The Day the Pig Fell in the Well." Both stories concentrate on people who come from the city (New York) for a few days or weeks in the country. Here is Cheever in "The Common Day": "He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city that after six days in New Hampshire he still found the beauty of the country morning violent and alien." In Updike's telling, the differences that he notices between city and country are great but they don't strike him the way they strike Cheever's character Jim. Cheever has a story to tell about the people he relocates to the country, and the story isn't pleasant. So, when Jim goes downstairs in his mother-in-law's house and goes out onto the terrace, "The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn." Jim is bewildered by the light and the smell in the air, but also enthralled. For Cheever, the world isn't there to reassure us; it doesn't conform to our efforts of measure. He is moved by its beauty, and his language rises to its celebration, but it's just as terrifying and it is glorious.

In Updike, with notable exceptions, all of creation bears the stamp of its creator. As Jonathan Yardley wrote in his review of Trust Me, the short story collection that contains "Leaf Season," "what most strongly unites these stories is Updike himself, with all his considerable strengths and his no less considerable weaknesses; for better and for worse one is constantly aware in these stories that Updike is at the controls, creating the world in his own terms."

A good illustration of how Updike controls the universe can be found at the end of "Leaf Season." Two of the couples gathered at the Tremayne's house in Vermont have left at the end of the Columbus Day weekend, but one woman, Linda Taylor, "announces she is going on another leaf walk. Do any of the littles want to go with her?" Three of the children, "all girls," go with her, along with the Tremayne's old dog, Wolf (Updike writes about the dogs with the same attention he gives to the people).

Linda takes them into the woods and holds up every different leaf for them to identify: the maple, beech, oak, and ash. Then she says, "'Girls, look up and around you. Those who went walking with me Saturday, do you notice any difference?'

'More sky,' says Aubrey, her own daughter, who knows what answer she wants.

'That's right,' Linda says, intensely grateful. 'And yet, standing here, who can see a leaf fall?'

No one speaks. A minute passes. No leaf falls.

'Oh, if we stood here long enough,' Linda concedes, 'or if there were a wind, or a hard rain like we had last night; but normally it happens unobserved, the moment when the root of the stem, where the bud once was, decides the time has come to let go. But it happens.' She looks upward and lifts her arms. The widened light falls upon her face and palms, and the little girls grow still, feeling threatened by something within the woman that she is pulling from the air, from the reds and golds trembling around them. 'Nobody sees it happen, but it does. For suddenly, it seems, the woods are bare.'"

A perfectly lovely moment, made perfectly lovely by Updike. But I don't believe it. Updike's use of the word upon is a dead giveaway. It signals that something poetic is happening. But, based on my experience of watching falling leaves, like the Quaking Aspens in the mountains of Colorado, when the wind makes the trees seem as if they're trembling, it happens often enough to make nonsense of Updike's claim. I've seen blossoms fall in spring and seen and heard fruit falling in summer, even in the absence of wind or rain. One particularly long fall season in Iowa, I sat and watched oak leaves, which (according to Updike) are the last leaves to fall, let go and drop fifty feet to the ground around me.

But I should concentrate on the beauty of Updike's prose, which is, as usual, considerable. The evocation of October in Vermont is seductive, especially to someone (like me), a transplanted temperate climate native who is stranded in the tropics where no one has heard of - let alone seen - autumn. But James Wood was right when he reviewed Updike's late novel In the Beauty of the Lilies: "Updike is a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough. At times, his fondness for an expensive phrase obscures, because it marks the moment at which he inserts himself oppressively."

Keats famously wrote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." It's certainly a beautiful thought, and probably all the more beautiful for being so untrue. I suppose that Keats's passionately wanting it to be so made it so for the duration of his short life. But it isn't so. As Vernon Young put it, "Beauty is to protect us from the truth." Updike's beautiful prose, the beauty of which is by now banal, weaves a spell that sometimes illuminated the truth of a moment in time or a particular situation among his characters, but it was the beauty that drew him there and that continues to allure his readers. It is the beauty of a well-turned sentence or a pithily-expressed observation. They rarely provide enough light to illuminate the human soul. It is the beauty that moves us, not the exposed nerve, not the truth of the matter at hand.

All of Cheever's formidable talent as a writer was in the service of something other than beauty, and that something other was the truth about people, which was often dispiriting. His heroes, from the Manhattan elevator operator to the numberless salarymen and women who ride the commuter trains to and from Shady Hill, were somehow always confronted with the truth about themselves and their lives.  

Happy Columbus Day.


(1) Virginia Woolf joked that Eliot wore a "four-piece suit."
(2) Updike was 53 when the story was submitted to The New Yorker.
(2) Updike had Cheever beat - he published 134 stories in The New Yorker.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey

The way upward and the way downward are the same.
- Heraclitus


Shot on a small budget, with two of the most in demand British actors of the day, and a story about what used to be called a working class family, it is easy to mistake The Luck of Ginger Coffey for one of the British New Wave, "kitchen sink" films, like Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963). But, aside from Robert Shaw and Mary Ure, and the American director Irvin Kershner, Ginger Coffey was a Canadian production from the beginning.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey started out as a novel written by the undervalued Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore, published in 1960. The novel's hero, James Francis (Ginger) Coffey, is an Irishman who brings his wife Vera and young daughter Paulie with him to Montreal, Canada hoping to have a better go at success in life, success at whatever job he can land. When we meet him on a bright and cold morning, he is going out to look for a job with the rent money in his pocket.

Fifteen dollars and three cents. He counted it and put it in his trouser-pocket. Then picked his Tyrolean hat off the dresser, wondering if the two Alpine buttons and the little brush dingus in the hatband weren't a shade jaunty for the place he was going. Still, they might be lucky to him. And it was a lovely morning, clear and crisp and clean. Maybe that was a good augury. Maybe today his ship would come in.

The only ship that his wife, Vera, looks forward to is the one that will take her home to Ireland. Ginger hasn't much time left to find the job that will change his fortunes, and the novel tells us about his successes and - mostly - failures in the search. The third-person narration is limited to Ginger, who is such a habitual loser that, as we follow him around wintry Montreal, his missteps become a kind of litany in his life and make one realize that whenever the word "luck" appears in a story's title, it infers good luck and bad, a rise and an eventual, inevitable fall.

It was Moore's fourth novel, and its success attracted the interest of pioneering Canadian producer F. R. Crawley. Crawley got Moore to write a script, which unfortunately had to dispense with most of what you've just read and everything else in between - the whole of Ginger's inner life that film isn't very good at showing. But Crawley was lucky in his casting of the two lead roles. He got Robert Shaw, an excellent and charismatic actor, and Mary Ure, stage and screen actress who had already won an Oscar nomination for her performance in Sons and Lovers, and who also happened to be Mrs. Shaw at the time. Between them, and the raw location photography of Montreal, a beautiful city with which filmgoers weren't familiar, they made Moore's fine novel into a fine film.

Ginger is offered jobs - a proofreader and a diaper delivery driver - but his ambitions are bigger and he gets himself fired and almost gets in a fight. Meanwhile, Vera has left him for Joe McGlade, taking Paulie and most of Ginger's belongings with her. Having to stay at the YMCA, Ginger goes to same bar frequented by his ex-co-workers, is caught urinating in an alley outside a posh hotel, and lands in jail for public indecency. Vera shows up at his hearing the following morning at which the judge makes jokes at Irishman Ginger's expense. To Vera's surprise, Ginger swallows his pride and shows sufficient contrition to the judge that his case is dismissed. Over their coffee at a nearby diner, Ginger confesses to Vera what a loser he has been, having arrived at the discovery that his ship had come in years ago, and it's right under his nose - it's his wife, who loves him. He walks with her through the snow to her apartment and, when she goes inside, she leaves her door ajar so that Ginger can follow. The film backs away discreetly and closes on a shot of a high rise apartment block silhouetted against a feeble winter sky.

Brian Moore's ending, inside Ginger's head, is more explicit:

He pushed the bedroom door, let it drift shut. He unbuttoned his overcoat. In the dresser mirror, the man began to cry. Detached, he watched the tears run down that sad impostor's face, gather on the edges of that large mustache. Why was that man boohooing? Because he no longer lusted for his wife? Because he wasn't able to leave her? Ah, you idjit, you. Don't you know that love isn't just going to bed? Love isn't an act, it's a whole life. It's staying with her now because she needs you; it's knowing you and she will still care about each other when sex and day-dreams, fights and futures when all that's on the shelf and done with. Love why, I'll tell you what love is: it's you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a life-time's talk is over.

The last moment in the film, in which Ginger is standing in the cold outside the door to Vera's apartment, reminded me of the ending of Satyajit Ray's film Charulata. Charu's husband, having discovered her illicit feelings for his younger brother, and after learning that he has been cheated by a longtime business partner, has returned to their home - but he can't bring himself to come in. He stands there, unable to move, until Charu holds out her hand to him. As he reaches across the divide between them, Ray freezes the moment in an almost supernatural effect, viewed from several angles, and leaves them there, their reconciliation suspended.

This little film wouldn't have got as much attention as it did without the two actors playing Ginger and Vera Coffey. As I mentioned, Robert Shaw and Mary Ure were husband and wife when they appeared in The Luck of Ginger Coffey. And it's impossible for me to see them onscreen together without thinking about their tragic fates. They were both heavy drinkers. Because of his growing number of children (eventually numbering 10) Shaw had given up writing award-winning novels for the more lucrative profession of acting. He met Mary when she was married to John Osborne and she appeared with Shaw in one of Osborne's plays. They continued to pivot from stage to screen roles, and in 1974, after Mary's appearance in the disastrous premier of the play The Exorcism, Shaw found her dead of an alcohol/barbiturate overdose. She was just 42. Only four years later, at the age of 51, by then world famous but still having to scramble to make ends meet, Shaw collapsed and died on a roadside in Ireland of a massive heart attack. Knowing how sadly both of their lives would end, how poignant The Luck of Ginger Coffey's ending seems, in the cold light of a Montreal morning, as they face each other, the snow falling on them (beautifully, you can see a snowflake alight on Ure's lip and quickly melting).